The Genius of Rome 1592-1623 (Royal Academy, till 16 April)

Giants of the eternal city

Martin Gayford

Arebirth of art, of course, did not only occur at the Renaissance. Such events are recurrent in Western culture, and indeed in other traditions such as the Chinese. As in individual lives, after a period of doldrums, a point suddenly arrives when it is possible to imagine, and take the next step into the future. One such fertile period is examined in the Royal Academy's magnificent and unmissable new exhibition, The Genius of Rome 1592-1623.

This is a place and a time that has in the past received far less attention and fewer plaudits than, say. Florence in the era of Masaccio and Fra Angelico, or the 'High Renaissance' Rome of Michelangelo and Raphael. Nonetheless, Rome around the turn of the 17th centuty may well be more agreeable to contemporary taste.

As a period it has previously had what ad men call an image problem. Of its two presiding geniuses, one, Caravaggio, was under a critical cloud from shortly after his death until about 1950. Admittedly since then he has been acknowledged again as one of the greatest of all painters. Indeed his dark and disquieting blend of sexuality, religiosity and violence is more in tune with the age of Francis Bacon and Damien Hirst than the art of Raphael or Rembrandt. To judge from the flow of books, films and fictionalised biographies, Caravaggio is our Old Master — just as Botticelli was the Pre-Raphaelites'.

The other great painter of the era, Annibale Carracci, has had an opposite posthumous fate. Showered with praise until the early 19th century, he is now largely forgotten. And this exhibition will not entirely resurrect his reputation, since his most powerful works are unexhibitable, because they are frescoes bonded with the walls of the Palazzo Farnese in the centre of Rome. But there is enough on show — especially in the section devoted to landscape, a department of art in which Caravaggio took little interest — to suggest his importance.

While Caravaggio painted — often directly from life — pictures that combined earthy, vivid detail with claustrophobic drama, Carracci did something almost opposite. He reinvigorated the classical tradition of Raphael, adding a novel energy and joie de vivre, From Caravaggio sprang Georges de la Tour, the youthful Velazquez, the Rembrandt of 'The Blinding of Samson', and numerous painters throughout Europe. From Carracci came Poussin, Guido Reni and a classicising legion.

For a while the combined push these two giants gave to art was immensely fertilising. When the impact of Caravaggio waned in the middle of the century, the effect was enervating for Italian art. One reason for that waning was art criticism supporting the classical, Carracci party, written by, among others, Monsignor Agucchi, represented in an excellent portrait by Domenichino (it is often a mistake for artists to pay attention to critics).

But 17th-century art, even art in early 17th-century Rome, was more than just a tale of two geniuses. One of the points made clearly by this show is how complex and diverse the Roman art scene was in those years. There are times when a single city becomes an international capital of art. That was the position of Paris around 1900, when it was the centre not only for French artists, but the place to which an enterprising Spaniard such as Picasso, or Russian such as Chagall, would naturally gravitate. That was the role Rome played in the 17th century. Thus, around 1600, there were present in Rome not only Italian masters, but the young Rubens — who painted the high altarpiece of the Chiesa Nuova in 1608 (the sketches are on show at the RA).

Nor was Rubens the only one. We can see, in this exhibition, how a German painter, Adam Elsheimer, influenced an Italian master, Orazio Gentileschi (who at other times came under the spell of Caravaggio). Compare Gentileschi's little St Christopher and Elsheimer's wonderful and often tiny landscapes on copper; for example, the tiny and limpid Aurora. There were so many Dutch and Flemish artists in town that they banded together in a bohemian association of Bentvueghels, or birds of a feather. In addition to residents such as Elsheimer, there were also important figures passing through — the still life, flower and landscape specialist, Jan 'Velvet' Brueghel, for example.

The impetus towards landscape and still life, types of painting that Italians had tended to disdain, must have come in part from these Northerners. Michelangelo had crushingly remarked that in Flanders they paint 'the green grass of the fields, the shadows of trees, and rivers and bridges . . and all this, though it pleases some persons, is done without reason or art, without symmetry or proportion, without skilful choice or boldness, and, finally, without substance and vigour.'

Annibale Carracci took up this lowly genre, but he took care to inject most of those qualities — especially reason, symmetry and proportion. In other words, he invented the classical landscape, a geometricised and reordered version of the untidy original (thus the Poussinesque prospect had been going for some time before Poussin himself started to paint it).

Caravaggio was a wonderful still-life painter. He famously — and audaciously in the context of Italian art — remarked that painting a bunch of flowers gave him as much trouble as painting a figure, and the apples and grapes in 'Boy with a Basket of Fruit' look to have been executed with more attention than the figure. But the notion of still-life painting came from the North. On the other hand, Northern painters such as Elsheimer absorbed the Italian way with the figure.

Early Caravaggio is too much the stilllife painter for me. The fruit looks fine but — brilliant and original though the paintings are — the lute-playing boys look a bit too much like grapes. One of the clear messages of this exhibition is the astonishing growth of tragic power in Caravaggio's art. In the last room, devoted to big altarpieces, his 'Entombment' and 'Madonna del Loreto' knock everything else off the

8 walls, despite the fact that the latter has unfortunately been cleaned (and the presence of good works by Rubens and Guerci 4 no). The same is true earlier on of the rooms containing his 'Taking of Christ' from Dublin, and two tender and — to me — little-known paintings of St Francis. The

.9 exhibition leaves Caravaggio at the point when he fled Rome, a condemned murderer. There followed four more years in

• 55. which he blundered into one catastrophe after another around southern Italy and .3 Malta, and his art moved yet deeper into

tragic darkness.

This is a timely exhibition, in that it reveals a phase of art that is waiting to be discovered by the general public. It is one of the Royal Academy's finest coups, a show to put beside those devoted to 16thcentury Venice and 17th-century Naples in the 1980s.It deserves to be a huge success.